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Update: Errol Morris Remembers Tony Kornheiser!

Photo: Getty Images


After our plea yesterday morning for details on the potentially historic summit between onetime elementary-school classmates Errol Morris (documentarian) and Tony Kornheiser (sports talker) — Kornheiser was worried that Morris wouldn’t remember who he was — we were pleased to get a call from Tony himself. There was good news and bad news. The bad news is that Tony didn’t meet Errol at the screening of his new movie. The good news is that Errol remembers who he is!

At first, things looked bad. “So I get there last night at the screening,” Kornheiser said from Washington, “and I say, ‘Is Errol Morris here?’ But his flight is delayed! He isn’t going to be there until after the screening! And I had to go home, of course” — Kornheiser has a famously early bedtime, and there was American Idol to watch to boot — “so I didn’t get to see him.” But then five minutes later Tony called us back with an update: “He remembers me!” He explained that another classmate, Brent Glass — now the director of the Smithsonian’s Museum of American History — had stayed through the screening and, better yet, brought a photo of the entire sixth-grade class. “And Errol looked at it and remembered everybody.”

So what kind of kid was Errol Morris? “He was brilliant beyond words. But he wasn’t antisocial … he was asocial — he went by himself. I never would have imagined that this is what he would do all his life, interview people in documentaries — because I don’t recall him talking to anybody in sixth grade! It was Hewlett Elementary School in Long Island. Ida Fint was our teacher. I remember that, but I have no recall of anything that’s happened since 1984.”

Kornheiser laughed over the phone. “You’re too young to understand this, but you’re never more thrilled when you get older than you are for your friends to do something that brings them happiness. Errol’s going to see everyone next week when he’s back in D.C., we’re gonna organize a thing.”

Can Vulture bring a camera crew to the reunion? we asked.

“No.”

Earlier: An Anxious Nation Wants to Know: Will Errol Morris Remember Tony Kornheiser?

Update: Errol Morris Remembers Tony Kornheiser!